Hurry domestic vaccine funding, health experts tell government
OTTAWA — The Trudeau government is being pressed to approve funding for a made-inCanada COVID-19 vaccine to lessen the risk Canadians will have to line up and wait on a foreign-made pandemic cure.
Health-care professionals have written to Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains urging him to make up his mind on a proposal submitted in April by Providence Therapeutics of Toronto. The company is seeking $35 million to establish whether its vaccine is effective in humans after successful animal trials.
They say Canada has no guarantee it will be at the front of any line for an internationally produced pandemic cure. They attribute the government’s slowness to a long-standing public policy problem: reluctance to partner with pharmaceutical and biotech companies in the same way it has tried to bolster other sectors.
Laszlo Radvanyi, president and scientific director of the publicly funded Ontario Institute for Cancer Research, said: “When you’re dealing with a pandemic like this and the government has already spent millions of dollars on all sorts of things, an additional investment into another vaccine technology, to increase our shots on goal in Canada, to help ensure that we actually develop the best vaccine, the most efficacious vaccine, I think to me makes sense.”
The federal government has created a $600-million fund to support vaccine clinical trials and manufacturing inside Canada.
Providence has told the government it could deliver five million doses of its new mRNA vaccine by mid-2021 for use in Canada if it were able to successfully complete human testing.
The mRNA technology is new and untested, but experts say it has potential.
Radvanyi and others say the research deserves support because there are troubling signs Canadians might have wait to receive a vaccine that is developed abroad.
Canada has already invested in a vaccine-development partnership between China’s CanSino Biologics and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, but China has held up shipments it was supposed to send to Dalhousie researchers by the end of May to start human trials.
Canada-China relations are severely strained after China imprisoned two Canadian men, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, in apparent retaliation for the RCMP’s arresting Chinese hightech executive Meng Wanzhou on an U.S. extradition warrant in December 2018.
“This should have been flagged as an obstacle when contemplating doing this program. We’re not on the best of terms with the Chinese government,” said Radvanyi, who has collaborated with Providence on vaccine treatments for cancer and wrote to Bains to support the company.
He stressed that his support is based purely on the merits of the science behind the proposal.
“With any new technology, one needs to be careful not to drink the Kool-Aid, and let the data and the science speak for itself. But clearly there are really promising data emerging” from new mRNA vaccine tests, including from the American company Moderna Inc. and the German firm BioNTech SE, Radvanyi said.
Both those companies have been heavily funded through U.S. President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” program to fast-track a vaccine for the novel coronavirus.
Last week, the U.S. committed to pay BioNTech and its American partner Pfizer $1.95 billion to produce 100 million doses if their vaccine candidate proves safe and effective in humans. In April, the U.S. agreed to pay Moderna up to $483 million to fund its research. Next week, Moderna is set to launch a 30,000-person final round of testing to test the strength of its vaccine candidate.
“The mRNA technology is a newer more experimental technology, but completely worthy of being part of the actual analysis which is being undertaken and will be considered as part of the investment portfolio,” Canada’s chief public health officer, Dr. Theresa Tam said Friday.
Tam said the government is carefully examining data, while trying to take an “accelerated approach not just on the regulatory and clinical trial front, but also an accelerated approach on looking at investments as well.”
Providence’s chief executive Brad Sorenson said he has heard “crickets” from Ottawa since late May after his company submitted its proposal in April — after the government reached out to it as a possible vaccine-maker.
“We need a Canadian solution, a manufacturing solution in Canada,” Sorenson said.